Free Black Betty by Walter Mosley

took his keys. I always thought of him stopping at the sink to wash the blood from his mouth and clothes. He didn’t tell me about that, but I knew Mouse better than any brother I could have ever had. He was closer than a friend and he’d saved my life more times than a man should need saving.
    He was the darkness on the other side of the moon.
     
* * *
     
    “I’MA KILL ME somebody, Easy,” he said.
    “Who?”
    “I don’t know yet. But I do know that somebody give me up to the cops and that somebody was at John’s bar the night I cut Bruno down. Somebody got to die behind that shit.”
    The police were waiting for Raymond when he got home from killing Bruno Ingram. That’s why he was wearing the same suit. They knew he’d done the killing and were laying for him; he still had the murder gun hooked in his belt. It sure seemed that he was set up. As a matter of fact, if he’d known that I was in that doorway, I was the most likely candidate.
    “How you gonna kill somebody if you don’t know who did it? You don’t, right?”
    “No. But I remember who was there. You and John an’ three other men: Malcolm Reeves, Clinton Davis, and Melvin Quick.” He recited the names as if in a trance.
    “But if you don’t know now how you gonna know?”
    “Either I find out or I’ma kill all three of ’em. But one way or another I’ma get the man who did it.”
     
     
    MOUSE’S EX-WIFE, EttaMae, lived in a small white house surrounded by lemon groves, in the city of Compton. It was a tall single-story house that had a latticed skirt of crisscrossed green slats. The yard was big and unruly. Long shaggy grass grew around a rusty old slide left out there to remind Etta of when their son, LaMarque, was still a small child. In the center of the yard stood a half-dead crab-apple tree that was covered with some kind of splotchy blue-and-white fungus. Around the dying tree grew a garden full of eggplant, snap beans, and bushy tomatoes. Etta liked to be surrounded by things that were bountiful, but she didn’t turn away from hard times. When Etta was only a child, barely sixteen, she nursed her bedridden grandmother until the suffering old woman began to hate her.
    EttaMae was standing in the yard when we drove up to her solitary home.
    I never minded seeing EttaMae Harris. She would have been Rodin’s model if he were a black man and lived in the South. She was big and strong like a man but still womanly—very womanly. Her face wasn’t beautiful so much as it was handsome and proud. “Noble” is too weak a word to use to describe her looks and her bearing.
    Mouse and I walked up to the fence. Etta wore a simple cotton dress to do her work around the house.
    “Easy,” she said in greeting to me, but I could tell her full attention was on him.
    “Hey, Etta. House looks good. You painted it?”
    “I’m’onna start payin’ you back for the loan just as soon as I could get ahead on this here mortgage,” she answered.
    I nodded. I didn’t care. One of the reasons that I was broke is that I gave my money away to friends who had less than I did. That’s a poor man’s insurance: Give when you got it and hope that they remember and give back when you’re in need.
    “Hey, Etta,” Mouse said. His grin was a caged laugh.
    “What?”
    I could have been the twin to that dying tree for all they knew. Mouse was standing straighter by the moment, his smile getting deeper. I noticed then, for the first time, that Raymond was aging. You could see it around his eyes, a network of wrinkles that shivered with his grinning.
    Etta didn’t exhibit feelings like he did. But her silence and solemnity showed that she had been thinking about this man for her whole life. He was down in the core of her. Mouse had once told me that he was drawn to Etta because, as he said, “She’s a hungry woman.” I could see the hunger in her.
    I don’t know what might have happened if the door to the house hadn’t come open.
    “LaMarque,”